כי לא מחשבותי מחשבותיכם

כִּי לֹא מַחְשְׁבוֹתַי מַחְשְׁבוֹתֵיכֶם, וְלֹא דַרְכֵיכֶם דְּרָכָי

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Joanna: The First OTD Porn Star (As Far As I Know!)

Now there is Off the Derech and there is Way Off the Derech™. Joanna Angel is a pornstar celebrity who still dooesn’t eat on Yom Kippur, wants to marry a Jewish guy and hopes her children will have a bar / bat mitzvah.

The lively, giggling Angel says of herself that she began rebelling against convention at an early age. She grew up in New Jersey, the daughter of an Orthodox Israeli mother who had immigrated to the United States together with her husband, an American Jewish student she had met in Jerusalem. "My home was very religious." Angel says. "I went to a day school, and of course we kept Sabbath and were kosher at home. I never ate hametz on Passover and I always fasted on Yom Kippur. I still do that. I don't do all the rest, but I can't give those two things up."

Her rebellion started at an early age:

At the age of 13, Joanne started to move away from religion, and found herself drawn to the punk scene at her junior high school. She pierced her navel in ninth grade, something she managed to conceal from her mother for two years, with the secret being revealed at a highly inopportune moment. "It was Yom Kippur and we went to do tashlikh [ritual discarding of sins, in the form of crumbs, into a body of water] at some lake in New Jersey near the temple. When I raised my arm to throw the bread into the water, my shirt came up and my mother saw the piercing. She got really angry and she cried," she recalls.

Surprising enough, her parents are accepting of her:

Angel's swift entry into the porn world and the popularity she has earned among fans and the media upgraded her status quickly, but success took its toll. Many members of her extended family shunned her, and pressured her parents to do the same. This did not happen. "But today I can no longer go to temple. Everyone knows what I do and it's embarrassing," she says.

Her parents have also paid a price but, according to her, the decision to stand with her has served to make the family stronger. "My parents refused to disown me, and now some of the relatives who told them to do that are not longer speaking to them. When I saw the way my parents defended me, it brought me much closer to them. They say: 'We didn't tell her to do this, but she's our daughter, and we love her,'" Angel says.

Nonetheless, Angel says that her mother - with whom she remains close - does not approve of her occupation. "My mother worries about me a lot. You know, she's a Jewish mother and if she doesn't hear from me, she gets very worried," she says. According to her, her father admires her entrepreneurship, whereas her mother is trying to persuade her at least to stop appearing in the films. "I tell her 'No,' because that's the most fun part of my work. Running a business and dealing with checks and numbers, hiring people and firing people - that's really boring stuff. When I can simply have sex in front of a camera, that's great. It's great being the center of attention," she says.

Whow! To each his own, but I hope my kids will stay off this ‘derech’ as well.